Today is the day I start the 100 Days of Mandarin challenge! And I was psyched to be starting! If you’ve not heard of it before and are interested, here is a link to the introductory post.
Day one started quite well: I printed out a character list for the HSK 3 exam. The list has 300 characters on it, and I went through and underlined every character I could translate immediately from English into Mandarin. From there it all went… a little downhill: I only know 65 characters of the syllabus on sight. Which isn’t bad as I’ve only covered the first 80 characters so far.
But then I made a list of the English words and tried to write out those 65 characters in hanzi and got 18 right. Ouch! I don’t understand how my brain can recognise characters, or look at the English and know the pinyin but not remember how to write them. Guess I’m going to have to start drilling writing words out to get my brain into actively knowing them , instead of passively recognising them.
I began Operation Write More by copying out some sentences that used 以前 (before), 以后 (after) and 的时候 (temporal phrase to show when a moment happened) and then making up my own. I’m already feeling a little more confident with stroke order for some HSK 3 words like “鼻子”. There was a satisfying clunk in my brain when the grammar points made sense.
After some debate, I also shelled out on Chinese Zero to Hero (HSK 3). It’s getting to the stage where some of the grammar points are a little hard to fathom even after reading the textbook examples, and it looks as though ZtH has some decent and concise videos explaining them,
Later I’m going to draw up some more squared paper so I have enough for practicing writing more evenly sized characters. On regular lined paper some of them just end up looking like individual characters instead of components.
Wild Night In 